domain:noahpinion.blog
SkoomaDentist
8hr ago
How long would you say they are on average when it comes to page count? (ie. how long are those five paragraphs)
quiet_NaN
8hr ago
I think that sourcing the basics, e.g. a breadboard, wired resistors, capacitors, LEDs, jumper wires, some opamps, is not that hard.
Amazon or (in Germany) Conrad have you covered there (if you don't mind overpaying compared to what the parts would cost in bulk).
If you increase your budget to 200$, then different people will want very different things. Matrix LCDs, TTL logic chips, myriads of sensors, servos. Some will want passive SMD components (with different preferences to size).
And in that stage, they probably also want components which are not sold by Conrad, which is when things get painful.
There are, of course, companies which carry zillons of electronic components, e.g. Farnell, Mouser, RS, Digikey. Their stock is well curated, you can filter based on dozens of criteria until you end up with what fits your needs. In fact, having used these websites I have come to despise the shopping experience on Amazon, where little in the way of curation happens and accessories for X regularly appear in the category X.
Alas, these electronics vendors do not typically sell to hobbyists. Presumably, cutting five chips from a reel and packing them for sale is not in itself very profitable, but simply a prerequisite to sell a reel of your chips to companies, eventually. Unlike corporations, private persons rarely scale up their projects to a scale where serious money gets spent, and complying with the consumer protection regulations is just not worth it.
So you sometimes find yourself in the situation where you know that four different companies carry the chip you want, but none of them want to sell to you. (These days, it might be possible that you can get it from China, if you don't mind the wait, though.)
Stefferi
Chief Suomiposter
8hr ago
I generally write standard 5-paragraph essays in the PolSci exams I'm currently taking and have been getting 4s and 5s (on an 1-5 rating scale).
ControlsFreak
9hr ago
I'm pretty sure antimatter gives you a lot more power than chemical rockets, by any reasonable definition.
I had said:
More? Yes. But in context, underwhelming.
Sure, I'd even agree to "a lot more". But "power" isn't necessarily the thing that we care about in rocketry. Nor are you seriously engaging with the exponential.
just like you don't need intergalactic travel to totally transform our spaceflight scene.
My brother in Christ, we are not disagreeing; you're just not engaging with the exponential. If we had an order of magnitude or two increase, that could totally transform our spaceflight scene. The moon could be routine. Mars could be like going on holiday. Even further could be an expedition. But the exponential is still the exponential, and in context of the insanity of exponentials and the universe, mere orders of magnitude only push back the hard stop a "little".
MadMonzer
Temporarily embarrassed liberal elite
9hr ago
What you can't do at Oxford or Cambridge any more is the broad-based curriculum that Roger Bacon would have recognised as a Liberal Arts education, or that the Ivies and SLACs still claim (partially falsely due to grade inflation) to be offering in the US. I don't know the history at Oxford, but at Cambridge the traditional Arts curriculum was grade-inflated into irrelevance by the first half of the nineteenth century, and by 1900 honours degrees (which began life as additional specialist exams on top of the basic liberal arts curriculum for the most able students) were the only degrees offered.
Lykurg
We're all living in Amerika
10hr ago
driving law
I think the theoretically proper way to do this is to make driving laws the "terms of service" for road use. Ordinary contracts can impose all sorts of conditions without mens rea, but punishments would be limited to monetary and losing your license.
That said, I dont think strict liability is really a problem, and its more so just bad- and overregulation in general. I mean, the feathers example doesnt turn on strict liability at all - ignorance of the law is no excuse in either case, and she clearly did intentionally take possession of those feathers. Its just that a ban on possession irrespective of provenance is appropriate to uranium, not bird feathers.
aldomilyar
10hr ago
I just watched the movie Sinners. Good movie, enjoyed the use of Folk motifs and generally cracking vibes and pace until the last 10 minutes or so.
I felt like the story they were telling didn't really need the bit with the Klan at the end, just seemed super detached from the rest of the movie. Would recommend the movie, all the same.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
11hr ago
· Edited 10hr ago
I agree with this. Europe is extremely sclerotic and mostly coasting on past developments and the contributions of rare reformers that actually patch out some of the excesses of our buerocracies, of which we have multiple layers all of which have an unquestioned mandate to grow unchecked by anything other than hard financial limits, and all of which promote a progressive vision of prosperous society as a thing that just works by default and can be taken for granted.
And nevermind defence; Europe is by and large a joke when it comes to military anything. Some countries more
- Germany hamstrung by graft and deeply-rooted anti-militarism,
- the mediterranean states by general incompetence,
- many just by being small,
some less
- France and Britain (not EU but still European, sue me) retaining the vestiges of their imperial military traditions
- the nordic countries and Poland remaining on edge thanks to Russia
but none of them likely to be able to put up a real fight against a peer or above-peer military power because Europe isn't a nation, or even a federation of nations, but simply an economic zone of economic zones, yadda yadda lack of social cohesion, I'm out of time, you know the drill.
FistfullOfCrows
11hr ago
I mean, isreal is already using "ai" to help decide shelling/strikes locations. Even if it's used as an excuse ( well the AI told us there were terrorists there ) it's still going to be hyper dystopian. We are going to look back fondly on the incompetent/unskilled labor from India in the near future. A harrowing thought.
faul_sname
Fuck around once, find out once. Do it again, now it's science.
11hr ago
How do you even 'define' intelligence. If we go by IQ estimates, 2x human intelligence is von Neumanns by the server rack
It is said that you have to be twice as smart to debug a clever piece of code as you have to be to write that piece of code. By that metric, an AI twice as smart as von Neumann would be capable of debugging a program that von Neumann was just barely capable of writing.
With AI you can do an arbitrary amount of testing pretty easily so no, that won't happen.
Lol. Lmao, even.
Is "do an arbitrary amount of testing, including testing the annoying boundaries with poorly documented external systems" where the incentives will point? I would bet against.
Southkraut
Vibe of vibes, saith the Preacher, vibe of vibes; all is vibe.
11hr ago
This is so strange to read. Literally half my degree dropped out in our first year because of self-selection and mandatory credit requirements. This was treated as entirely normal and a good thing, as it is obviously a bad thing for people to waste their time and money on degrees they don't like/aren't capable of following.
Germany is usually fairly generous with educations, but at my (provincial, no-name) university, all Bachelor CompSci students were treated as completely without value and it was fully expected that 80%-90% would drop out before getting their degree. It was only when students proved themselves by working towards a Master's degree while also getting involved with research, or aimed higher yet, that faculty would start getting invested in them in any way. Teaching seemed very much like an afterthought, or an unloved chore.
FistfullOfCrows
11hr ago
Trump also wheeled out the pork barrel for Ai, maybe less than the Chinese will, maybe there will be more pork later.
pbmonster
11hr ago
I was in undergrad 15 years ago and teach those courses today. The standard math and physics intro courses have not gotten easier, drop-out rates are about the same. STEM education is pretty conservative, especially so outside the CS departments.
All but the best reasoning models hallucinate so much on standard problem sets that they're not very useful to students (who overwhelmingly only use free models). Also, those problem sets mirror closely what will be on the exam, where using an LLM is only possible on a bathroom break. The students who don't drop out by year two usually have learned that they need to do the problem sets themselves for their own good.
Students will cheat on lab reports, but they always did that. Today, it's ChatGPT, 15 years ago it was a Dropbox with old lab reports to copy from. Proficient cheaters will only "get help" on abstract, conclusion and the theory section - which is hard to proof, so we look the other way. Bad cheaters will copy the data analysis section, or even the experimental data. This is extremely easy to prove, and those get nuked in public.
Jiro
11hr ago
The only way a suggestion for Pasha teaching himself about ethics violates the value judgement of dimwit professors teaching ethics is if Pasha is a dimwit professor
Come on. There's a difference between "I am suggesting that people do this to learn life skills" and "I am suggesting that people do this to justify my claims". Ethics classes are recommended in the former context. Your "recommendation" that Pasha study things himself was in the latter context. You should just explain it, since you are the one making the claim, not demand he study it himself.
People are supposed to back up what they say here. "I want you to do it on your own" is a filibuster, not an honest argument.
Jiro
11hr ago
The big risk for the student: what if they don't get hired by Palantir?
Or what if they do and end up having to quit (or Palantir goes bankrupt)? Not having other options is bad even if you get the job.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
11hr ago
It's the responsibility of the ministry of education in most countries.
orthoxerox
If you can read this, you're using a custom theme
11hr ago
You never know. When my toy railway project stalled because I couldn't be bothered to print 20 iterations to get the turnouts right, I stopped and my printer has been gathering dust since. I should probably sell it.
On the other hand, my former colleague has been printing stuff like a possessed man.
Owlify
12hr ago
Yes, but their status relative to their husband will be lower, and even if they don't care about that then the things you have to do to marry someone high status and stay married to them are very different from the things you have to do to have your own achievements and gain status through them. One is much more agentic and less dependent on other people so it will be the preferred method.
SkoomaDentist
12hr ago
I did engineering but the grading guide for such questions was generally "A perfect answer should cover almost all of [a list of points]". A question might be something like "Explain FIR and IIR filters and compare their advantages and disadvantages" (I specialized in signal processing). You can fit quite a lot of points in two pages if you don't spend the majority of it on pointless waffling like Scott always does.
Another way to look at it is that if four pages of writing is enough to get me a conference paper (and thus effectively counts as a course's worth of credits with a perfect grade), why should I spend more than half of that on an essay worth 25% of exam points?
Sure, it's different if you're studying literature or something similar where the writing itself is the point but for the vast majority of topics the point of such essay answers is simply to show that you understand the topic, not to make the grader suffer through your poorly filtered stream of consciousness.
urquan
Blessings crown the head of the righteous, but violence overwhelms the mouth of the wicked.
13hr ago
It would have been better if it'd happened differently, but I think Bubbles is better off. I know I found it really freeing when I realized the competitive and performance-focused environment of WoW wasn't for me and started playing other games.
sarker
It isn't happening, and if it is, it's a bad thing
13hr ago
To a first approximation, every STEM course I took in undergrad was curved, and every humanities course was not.
TowardsPanna
13hr ago
Lol. Sounds a bit painful.
This makes me think that groups should be more sorted by skill. I remember being in a team vs team game clan that was more "social" and carried a few horrendous players. It affected my enjoyment.
BlindDeafRat
13hr ago
What is "keyboard turning"?
You can turn your character with A and D, or you can do it with your mouse. Mouse is much, much faster and more precise. It's easier to dodge mechanics and have better awareness if you use your mouse.
A some people (usually beginners) also click on their abilities instead of using hotkeys. So their mouse is too busy to focus on turning.
It's a sign of not playing in an optimal way.
SkoomaDentist
13hr ago
I believe it works the same way in most of Northern Europe. Multiple canteens operated by companies providing subsidized meals for students and below market rate rental housing owned by various non-profit foundations and student unions, all with loose association with the universities (ie. you have to be a student in one of them to live in the housing / receive subsidization but the universities have no control over any of that).
Many of them do (likely because they realize that "hobbyist" might be in a position to decide where to order parts for a company in a year or two). They just have somewhat higher mailing costs which get waived if you order enough euros worth of parts at once. My hobby projects with a friend have made them more than a thousand euros worth of business by now once we expanded to making diy kits of some projects and needed multiple prototype rounds.
More options
Context Copy link